• Ronan J Kelly, Jaffer A Ajani, Jaroslaw Kuzdzal, Thomas Zander, Eric Van Cutsem, Guillaume Piessen, Guillermo Mendez, Josephine Feliciano, Satoru Motoyama, Astrid Lièvre, Hope Uronis, Elena Elimova, Cecile Grootscholten, Karen Geboes, Syed Zafar, Stephanie Snow, Andrew H Ko, Kynan Feeney, Michael Schenker, Piotr Kocon, Jenny Zhang, Lili Zhu, Ming Lei, Prianka Singh, Kaoru Kondo, James M Cleary, Markus Moehler, and CheckMate 577 Investigators.
• From the Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center at Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas (R.J.K.), and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston (J.A.A.); Jagiellonian University Medical College, John Paul II Hospital, Krakow, Poland (J.K., P.K.); the University Hospital Cologne, Department of Internal Medicine, Center for Integrated Oncology Aachen-Bonn-Cologne-Duesseldorf, Gastrointestinal Cancer Group Cologne, Cologne (T.Z.), and University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (M.M.) - both in Germany; University Hospitals Gasthuisberg Leuven and KU Leuven, Leuven (E.V.C.), and Ghent University Hospital, Ghent (K.G.) - both in Belgium; University Lille, Claude Huriez University Hospital, Lille (G.P.), and Pontchaillou University Hospital, Department of Gastroenterology, University of Rennes 1, INSERM Unité 1242, Rennes (A.L.) - both in France; Fundación Favaloro, Buenos Aires (G.M.); Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (J.F.); Akita University Hospital, Akita, Japan (S.M.); Duke Cancer Institute, Durham, NC (H.U.); Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto (E.E.), and Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, Halifax, NS (S.S.) - both in Canada; the Netherlands Cancer Institute-Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, Amsterdam (C.G.); Florida Cancer Specialists and Research Institute, Fort Myers (S.Z.); University of California, San Francisco, Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco (A.H.K.); St. John of God Murdoch Hospital, Murdoch, WA, Australia (K.F.); Sfantul Nectarie Oncology Center, Craiova, Romania (M.S.); Bristol Myers Squibb, Princeton, NJ (J.Z., L.Z., M.L., P.S., K.K.); and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston (J.M.C.).
• N. Engl. J. Med. 2021 Apr 1; 384 (13): 119112031191-1203.

BackgroundNo adjuvant treatment has been established for patients who remain at high risk for recurrence after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy and surgery for esophageal or gastroesophageal junction cancer.MethodsWe conducted CheckMate 577, a global, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 trial to evaluate a checkpoint inhibitor as adjuvant therapy in patients with esophageal or gastroesophageal junction cancer. Adults with resected (R0) stage II or III esophageal or gastroesophageal junction cancer who had received neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy and had residual pathological disease were randomly assigned in a 2:1 ratio to receive nivolumab (at a dose of 240 mg every 2 weeks for 16 weeks, followed by nivolumab at a dose of 480 mg every 4 weeks) or matching placebo. The maximum duration of the trial intervention period was 1 year. The primary end point was disease-free survival.ResultsThe median follow-up was 24.4 months. Among the 532 patients who received nivolumab, the median disease-free survival was 22.4 months (95% confidence interval [CI], 16.6 to 34.0), as compared with 11.0 months (95% CI, 8.3 to 14.3) among the 262 patients who received placebo (hazard ratio for disease recurrence or death, 0.69; 96.4% CI, 0.56 to 0.86; P<0.001). Disease-free survival favored nivolumab across multiple prespecified subgroups. Grade 3 or 4 adverse events that were considered by the investigators to be related to the active drug or placebo occurred in 71 of 532 patients (13%) in the nivolumab group and 15 of 260 patients (6%) in the placebo group. The trial regimen was discontinued because of adverse events related to the active drug or placebo in 9% of the patients in the nivolumab group and 3% of those in the placebo group.ConclusionsAmong patients with resected esophageal or gastroesophageal junction cancer who had received neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy, disease-free survival was significantly longer among those who received nivolumab adjuvant therapy than among those who received placebo. (Funded by Bristol Myers Squibb and Ono Pharmaceutical; CheckMate 577 ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT02743494.).Copyright © 2021 Massachusetts Medical Society.

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